Archive for December, 2009

My cats, Phoebe in the picture above, and Cleo, her sister, will be joining us in Edinburgh on February 1st. My lovely ex-husband is not prepared to keep them and so they will have to get used to city living!!! We have a small back garden which backs on to masses of other small back gardens… so they will have to work out their new territory. Hopefully without too much ado. There are also very large gated communal gardens for the crescent, but they will have to cross a road for those and I am reluctant to let them do that.

The flat, however, is rather more fun for cats than the house they are coming from. It sports a very inviting, enormously thick rope as a banister along the wall down the stone stairway from ground to garden floor, so I expect they will have fun chasing each other at speed along it upside down. They will also be able to hurl themselves off the iron banisters from the top hall down to the bottom hall. Then there are the very high ceilings and equally high shutters inviting a climb and a rest atop to enjoy the view – bliss for orientals! Raw mince and the promise of plentiful Edinburgh mice may well help too.

Well, nearly… we’ve moved everything from Joolz’ flat and everything from my flat in Edinburgh, and tomorrow, Tuesday, the rest of my furniture and books arrive from Sussex. Hmmm. I’m not sure what my lovely ex-husband has put in the removal van for me … hopefully all the correct furniture and my books… he is saying that he has packed ‘some other stuff’ as well. I don’t know quite what he means, but we’ll see what arrives. I’m looking forward to the piano, the grandfather clock and the old Chesterfield sofa which will go straight off to be reupholstered.

The flat is beautiful and it is wonderful to have space again. I haven’t even been out into the garden yet, and we moved on Friday! I have taken this week off apart from today in London so I shall have time to explore. There are interesting things to get to grips with, like the burglar alarm and, in reverse, the ‘exit system’… the vendors have a lovely little downs syndrome girl who used to go walkabout in the centre of Edinburgh, so they had an exit lock fitted so she couldn’t get out unaccompanied. We have to key in the code to get out of our front door! Then there’s a rather bizarre heating and hot water system and underfloor heating in the upstairs bathroom. A quiet couple of hours with the instruction manuals will do wonders.

Drawing room and kitchen are as good as finished, so we now have somewhere to eat and collapse 🙂 It’s amazing how many jars of lentils, beans, rice and dark muscovado sugar one can accumulate when living out of two flats… somehow rather more than twice as many as in one flat. (What on earth did we need all the sugar for?) Joolz has worked out how the open fire in the drawing room is best lit and kept a) alive and b) from burning out in two minutes. There are woodburners in the kitchen and the playroom (where Joolz will do her sculpture and furniture restoration and I shall do messy fabric stuff, and we shall try some mosaic soon). I can’t wait to get the woodburners going – apparently they are dual fuel… not sure what that means exactly, I’m just used to logs, but we’ll find out. Our bedroom is awash with clothes as the wardrobes we bought won’t be delivered until February! Until then there are motley chests of drawers and my little old wardrobe donated by one of my sons. Joolz has several boxes of shoes which are still looking for a home.

Joolz has started painting the spare bedroom which was in glorious shades of bubblegum pink stripes – her mother is arriving on Wednesday for a quick visit, so that gave us a deadline! The office, which we shall be using as a clinic room for the while, is as yet untouched and full of boxes, but doesn’t need redecorating. The two other bedrooms we shall be using for work, and the decorators turn up on the 15th, so we haven’t even been in there yet.

The books are spilling out everywhere. Joolz packed 50 boxes of books for me from my flat and a few more from hers, and there are more arriving from Sussex, so we are having shelves made for the library. All the other shelves have been distributed around the flat and the vendors left two very large bookcases behind which are now in the drawing room.

The yarn boxes are in the downstairs hall hoping for a space in one of the storage cupboards, which we conveniently can’t get at because of the yarn boxes stacked neatly in front of the door 🙂 My yarn baskets are in the drawing room and in the playroom. Bliss! I really want to sit down with a cup of tea and get on with some knitting 🙂

Oh yes, and my divorce came through in the same week as we concluded missives (completed) on the flat, and all went very amicably and well. Such a relief! I need the Christmas break now.